The integrated circuit is an electronic circuit that has been manufactured on a monolithic substrate material. The integrated circuit is also typically referred to as a monolithic IC, microchip, microcircuit, or chip. The integrated circuit may have hundreds of millions of circuit elements, such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and the like. The electronic circuits implemented in monolithic integrated circuits may be analog, digital or mixes signal circuits. Integrated circuits may include microprocessors (e.g., CPU, GPU, DSP, microcontroller), memory chips (e.g., RAM, ROM, Flash), application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and many more electronic circuits.
As the semiconductor fabrication arts continue to progress, the scale of the circuit elements in integrated circuits tends to continue to decrease, allowing more circuits to be implemented on an integrated circuit substrate. However, as the scale of the circuit elements decreases, the power consumption of the integrated circuits tends to increase. In addition, the leakage current of various circuit elements tends to increase and therefore the power consumed by the circuits also tends increase even if one or more circuits within the integrated circuit are not currently operating.
In the conventional art, one or more circuits within the integrated circuit may be selectively turned off when the particular circuit is idle to conserve power. However, such sleep and/or standby mode techniques may cause large switching current surges. The large switching current surges may cause switching current induced noise in one or more other circuits in the integrated circuit, may cause a drop in one or more supply potentials within the integrated circuit causing logic level errors in one or more other circuits in the integrated circuit, may cause localized heating that may damage the integrated circuit, and/or the like. Accordingly, there is a continued need for improved sleep and/or standby mode techniques.